Who's The Go-To For suggesting a good Laptop?

What's your budget?

I have a relatively inexpensive HP Pavilion, and while I don't do many games on it, it seems to do all of the other things you mentioned just fine.

All of my laptop experience is with corporate stuff, which doesn't include high-end graphics.

I think you'll find that the graphics card is going to be the bottleneck.

just about any built in wifi or dvd burner will do the job.

High graphic shooter games seems to be the high end thing you should look for in laptop. You want a good graphics card and a lot of memory. Not sure if laptops come with graphics cards with their own memory but that would be the best choice.

You might want to check out forums for the games you play and see if anyone there has suggestions.

This looks like a pretty good deal.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9168063&type=product&id=1218041998438&ref=09&loc=01&srccode=cii_5766179&cpncode=24-21790103-2


http://computershopper.com/best-prices/category/3121/most-popular/1/Notebooks/1101502/1101502-13087975_

http://computershopper.com/laptops/gaming-laptops/top-5-gaming-laptops

As long as you have more than 2GB of RAM you should be able to do pretty much anything other than high-end graphics. And by high end I mean that even without a dedicated graphics card gaming is fine except for the certain games on certain settings.

You can get laptops with dedicated graphics cards, but they aren't nearly as common as onboard graphics and they will bump up the price of the laptop significantly.

I'd just go for extra RAM and the onboard graphics card personally.

As to brands, I really like Toshiba for laptops. They aren't very cheap direct, but there are often good discounts on Amazon.

I own three Toshiba laptops and I can say from direct experience that they are now somewhat overpriced and under-performing, compared to other brands such as the better Acers.

They used to be great for the price but they have slipped over the last few years and now are very average.

However the bottom line is that laptops have become very much like commodities, in that the differences between brands (within a given price range) are much less important than it used to be.

So basically buy the highest spec'ed laptop your budget allows, don't overly worry about the brand name, and you'll be golden.

buy from Costco....you get a two year warrenty plus great tech help from costco for simple problems

Thanks everyone for great advice - I can prolly spend about 1300 without making the boss mad, in answer to the 'budget' question... that should be enuf to get something good, I hope. I'm getting more knowledgeable about specs and brands and will pick one in a week's time.

As I type this I am on a 3 year old laptop that runs Windows XP and has 768mb of RAM.

It will do everything you ask (except games) and can probably be bought for $250 on ebay (and you can probably find a new one).

I also have a new laptop that I spent $500 on that will even run games (albeit at lower resolutions and with less clarity). You can spend what you want, but even the bare basics laptop (cheapest you can buy) will run internet explorer, Office applications, and play DVDs.

http://www.costco.com/Browse/ProductSet.aspx?ec=BC-EC27003-ProdID11329202&pos=0&whse=BC&topnav=&prodid=11320291&lang=en-US

I like Costso, if you have an American Express Costco card you get 4% cash back at the end of the year, and American Express doubles the manufacturer's warranty...........but NCIX is generally cheaper with way-mega-selection as compared to Costco, so they are my number one computer store.

http://www.ncix.com/

So, if I could have a laptop with optimal ability to run games, would the main things be getting a good graphics card and plenty of RAM? And, is a video card like a graphics card, or are those two different things?

Yes


Yes


No

Nobody seems to like Windows Vista very much. It's a resource hog and there are compatability issues with a lot of programs and hardware. They just releases a beta version of Windows 7, the Vista successor, with some suggestion that it'll be out in the second half of '09. From first reports, it may be less of a hog and fixes some of the things people didn't like about Vista, tho running on essentially the samefoundation. You might want to wait a bit, snood. Alternatively, you can get a number of laptops with either Vista or XP, and people are generally happier with XP, tho Microsof, in their usual fashion, has said they're going to stop supporting it after, I think, July.

Anyone want to give him (and all of us)some more advice on which OS you think would work better?

Nick has been running Windows 7, he's impressed with it.

I haven't run it, but am pretty familiar with what it purports to introduce and I am looking forward to it.

That being said, I think Vista is the best operating system Microsoft has made, and that it gets a bad rap mainly because it allowed its manufacturers to ship it with underpowered machines. Windows 7 contains simple but very fundamental UI tweaks to Vista (that bar at the bottom of your screen is going to work very differently) that I think are big usability improvements.

That bit from Monterey Jack about Vista is a valid point (drat! I'm all hot-to-trot to buy my new toy!) To be honest, I've heard some consistent grumbling about Vista from some people at the hospital where I work who have gotten new machines put in by IT, and are now pining for XP. Is my choice really between an OS that is going to wind up being an ungainly clunker with bugs (Vista), or one whose manufacturer is going to withdraw support on in a couple months (XP - because it looks like Windows 07 isn't going to be widely available until down the road)?

Most of the complaints against Vista aren't really valid, or can be changed. One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that it uses too much RAM. What people don't understand is that the operating system tries to use as much RAM as possible, because it acts as a cache and pre-fetches what you are going to need, making the OS faster. However people are used to thinking high memory usage = bad, but the way vista manages RAM it really isn't the case.

For example, in win7 right now, only 22MB of memory is free. However, 1115MB is 'standby' which means that it is being used as cache, and can be re-purposed instantly whenever more active memory is needed.

Most of the other features can be disabled, as well. If you really don't think the new Aero interface is worth the memory it takes up, then you can disable all the live previews, transparencies, etc (leaving you with an interface much closer to XP).

People don't like that things have moved in Vista, but I think that is just a knee jerk reaction. I think its much easier, because virtually everything I need to do on my computer can be found in the search bar that resides in the start menu. If I need to remove a program, I start to type 'remove program' and it finds 'Add or Remove Programs' in the control panel. I can also type 'Remote Desktop', 'device manager', or 'power management'. Many variations of these work also, and the search is live so as soon as it knows what you want, you can stop typing. I can get to remote desktop by typing 'r' for example.

If Vista starts nagging you too much with 'Do you want to allow this program to do this' type messages, you can disable UAC and problem solved.

Robert is right, Vista is the best OS Microsoft has released (until windows 7 comes out). I would hope they offer a cheap upgrade path from Vista to 7, but we'll see what happens. I do know you will be able to upgrade to 7 from Vista without losing any data, but upgrading from XP to 7 will require a hard drive reformat.

I recently bought a new Sony VAIO with plenty of RAM and space and with all the bells and whistles necessary for games for less than $1000. (Yes it was on sale.) It is our third Sony though and they are sweet, dependable machines, and so far so good with this one. It did come with Vista which has been fine except that it doesn't play well with AOL, but I'm getting around that.

Well, I've done gone and bit the bullet.
I bought a HP HDX16t with Windows Vista Premium Home Edition (64 bit), a big (500GB) hard drive, a fast processor, a bunch of RAM, a souped-up graphics card, a bunch of doodads (like fingerprint reader) thrown in, and good-god-a-mighty I spent over 1600 bucks!!!!
...should be here by 17 Feb.